The concept is fantastic to sell. But would I buy it? Only for data I consider non critical
I have sold these services as well as more generic data centre hosting. Trust me, we can make any managed service ROI look good. The question is what happens after you bought it and who is going to be the first poster child for the already overdue massive and public failure of one of these services.
The devil is in the delivery.
Personally I have a vested interest in cloud based computing selling to our client base. But would I make the same decision if I was a CIO. Absolutely not if it was from any of the five biggest companies aggresively selling it.
One IT director I know of in the financial sector made the truest comment I have heard in this whole debate. "You would have to go a long way to convince me that anyone is going to prioritize my data more highly than I do or look after it as good as I will."
Having been inside companies selling it, I can say with all honesty that he was absolutely right. He is worth the value of his contract with them. But to him, his data is absolutely central to all they do. Its not even ine the same ballpark.